


Come Angels of Unknown

by corruptedkid



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: End of the World, Gen, One Shot, Podfic Welcome, Prophecy, Surreal, this is another one of my conceptual works if you can't tell from the tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 23:09:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13375023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corruptedkid/pseuds/corruptedkid
Summary: Four boys, no answers, and the ending they can't see.





	Come Angels of Unknown

**Author's Note:**

> make of this what you will.

Something’s coming. 

Gerard can feel it in the air. It’s a subtle shift in atmosphere, a pull that guides his brush across the page, darkening the paper with thick black ink. The lights are all out, but he knows what he’s doing. In the suffocating darkness of his room, he crafts a picture he can’t yet see. He doesn’t think about what it will be. He only knows that it will be.

The lines curve and twist across the page. He can taste the scent of ink, bitter on the back of his tongue. He touches a finger to the dampened page, and it comes back wet, stained with a pigment he can’t make out. Probably black. But who can know for sure?

The air in the room has gone stale. He wonders how much time has gone by.

However long it takes, he finishes. He gets up, climbing over piles of blankets and torn papers and dirty clothes, to turn on the lights. When they flick on, his pupils contract and dilate, a zoom lens focusing in on the image he’s created.

Oh. So that’s what it is.

***

Ray sits back on his heels, taking in the mess of tacked-up papers on the wall before him. Exhaustion tugs at his eyelids. He barely feels it. There’s an itch beneath his skin, the subtle feeling of wrongness that comes when he’s missed something.

Newspaper clippings. Old journal entries, torn at the edges. Polaroids. Clickbait articles hung up high, like crosses for a Christian. This is his gospel. He isn’t meant to understand it, only to bring it into being. And it’s not done yet. 

Ray reaches to the side without looking and grabs a pin. He sticks it into the nearest scrap of paper, letting it sink deep into the wall before he loops a bright red strand of yarn around it, sewing it into his spider’s web. Better. But not done. 

Ray tilts his head to one side, then the other. Seeing from different angles usually helps. This time, it doesn’t. He tries closing his eyes. Sometimes that’s the only thing he can do to really see. 

His finger twitches, and he pounces on the movement. Impulses are good. Any sort of guidance is good. He follows his gut to an article from the nineties pinned up off to the right. 

“Oh,” he says to himself, surprised, yet not surprised at all. 

He takes a new pin and sticks it into the wall. Once he connects it to the others, everything makes sense. He doesn’t know how he didn’t see it before.

But then again, it’s not his job to see. 

He tears the paper down and sweeps out the door.

***

Mikey is an addict. A screen junkie, forever chasing his next fix, his fingers flying over buttons and joysticks or whatever flashy pixels catch his eye.

Everyone else has left the arcade by now. Actually, he’s not sure if it was even open in the first place. Not that it matters. He doesn’t remember coming in, and he can’t see himself leaving anytime soon. 

His eyes ache from drinking in the bright lights. His character keeps running across the screen in jumpy little movements, and he keeps guiding it along. He hasn’t beaten his high score yet. It’ll take another thousand points, possibly a few more tries, but he’s not going anywhere.

His concentration slips for a millisecond, and his character smashes into a brick wall. A curse flickers across his mind, but his fingers are already jumping into action, feeding another coin into the machine to restart the level. His eyes never leave the screen.

The graphics get progressively better as he advances through the game, but he can’t pay attention to them. He’s too busy racing the machine. He leaps across impossible divides, defying gravity and physics and whatever laws dare to think they can rule his existence, all in the hope of escaping his synthetic fate for one more minute. 

He jerks the controller too far to the right, and his character falls down a bottomless pit.

Oh well. Three hundredth time’s the charm.

This time, Mikey lets himself completely zone out. He sinks deep into the digital, forgetting the arcade in his peripherals and letting the screen take over. It expands and fills his vision, and he can almost feel the smack of the pavement beneath his feet as his character sprints toward the finish line. His body’s buzzing with adrenaline. Just a little closer. 

Just a little further.

Duck. Jump. Run. Duck. Duck. Slide. Jump. 

He feels like he should be shaking, but his hands are steady. 

With lightning precision, he snags an extra fifty coins and hurtles to the end of the level. The screen lights up with bursts of color, announcing a new high score.

Mikey sags against the console, exhaling for the first time in what feels like forever. After taking a minute to catch his breath, he takes a minute to look up and examine the screen. He finally pays attention to the details instead of the incoming obstacles. 

As soon as he can get a glimpse, the display flickers and dies.

Mikey stares at it for a minute, the afterimage fading behind his eyelids. 

***

Frank wipes a smear of red away from his nose. 

He rolls his shoulders, and the joints pop. It’s been a while since he’s gotten his ass kicked that badly. Usually, when the shadows rear and take up arms against him, he’s ready. He beats them back with a baseball bat stuck full of nails and glass shards. It doesn’t really do anything, but fuck if it doesn’t feel good to swing. It gives him a way to channel that intent, and really, that’s what he needs.

So maybe it does something after all.

Whatever. Frank flexes his fingers, the red-blue-purple bruises on his knuckles aching. The fight is done; for now, at least. Now, his job is to stay on guard. The ambushes have been popping up more and more frequently as of late. He doesn’t like to think about what it means. He knows someone who would, but he hasn’t showed up yet. If he does, then Frank will know something is wrong, but until then, he’s fine.

He wanders over to the edge of the roof, his boots scuffing against the rough paved-rooftop. Once he reaches the edge, he gazes down across the city below him, a vast sea of black lit up by streetlights and neon signs. 

There’s a flap and a stir in the wind behind him. He glances over his shoulder. The crows are spiraling down, almost invisible in the night sky. He can see them, though, when they blot out the stars. He can feel their wings cut through the air.

One swoops down and alights on the ground before him, cocking its head and peering up and him with one beady eye. 

Frank squats down and holds out his arm. The crow hops forward once, twice, and flaps its wings to perch on his wrist. It pecks at his bruised knuckles. Frank doesn’t flinch. 

The wind rushes across the rooftop, tossing his hair back. He closes his eyes and lets it wash over him. It bites through his denim jacket easily, chilling him to the bone.

When he opens his eyes, Gerard is sitting on the other side of the roof, his legs hanging off the ledge.

Well, fuck. 

***

“Something’s coming,” Gerard says. No one objects. They all know it. They’ve all seen it. It’s big, and it’s bad, and it’s getting closer every day.

“Do you know what it is?” Ray ventures. 

Gerard nods. 

Frank swears under his breath. “Can we fight it?”

“Yes,” says Mikey. “But we’ll lose.”

Frank swears again. He kicks at the edge of the roof, and the crows around him flutter away a few feet. The one perched on his shoulder adjusts its feet, but doesn’t move. “What can we do, then?” Frank asks. “We can’t just run away.”

“We could,” Ray murmurs. 

“We could,” Gerard agrees. “But I think we’re supposed to find another way out.”

Frank snorts. “Like what?”

Ray reaches into his pocket and pulls out a torn piece of paper. “I think I know what to do,” he says slowly. “But I’m not sure how we do it.”

Gerard holds out his hand. Ray passes him the paper. Gerard pulls out an ink-stained page and compares it to Ray’s paper. His eyebrows shoot up. “Oh,” he says. “Okay. I can see that.”

No one asks what he means. They probably wouldn’t understand it anyway. 

“Stupid question,” Frank says hesitantly, “But, are we gonna survive this?”

Gerard looks at him, and his eyes are distant, focused in another world. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s not my job to see the ending. Only what we’re up against.”

Frank looks at Mikey.

“I don’t know,” Mikey says. “Maybe we will. Maybe we won’t. Maybe it’s not a good thing if we do.”

There’s an unspoken pair to that last option, but Frank doesn’t voice it. Failure isn’t a nice subject to think on.

The crow that’s been sitting on Frank’s shoulder flaps its wings. It swoops toward Gerard and snatches both papers from his hands, then lands between the four of them, scratching one gnarled claw across Gerard’s drawing. Its gaze is piercing. 

Frank takes Gerard’s hand. 

Gerard takes Mikey’s, and Mikey takes Ray’s, and they’re all standing in a circle around their last defense. Hopefully, it will be enough. 

The rest of the crows circle overhead, gradually descending lower and lower. From this angle, they look more like vultures. 

“Here’s to surviving,” says Mikey.

“Here’s to the ending,” Gerard murmurs, “Whatever it brings.”

The crows flock around them, a seething mass of feather and bone. Frank’s nose is trickling blood again, but he doesn’t wipe it away. Ray has his eyes closed. Mikey’s are wide open.

Gerard exhales slowly, and lets intuition be his guide.


End file.
